I had over 700 followers from a single comment left in 2015 or so. It had nothing to do with the quality of that comment - NOTHING. In fact, it was a pretty boring comment, nothing more than a sentence of praise for the author's ability to "go viral" with whatever they'd written. Neither the article nor my comment were memorable. But it does serve as proof that some level of engagement is absolutely essential to growing an audience, or a following, on social media.

"Follow for follow" through, is useless. Lots of people follow me, in hopes that I'll follow back. I will - if they're paid members of the platform. But it won't earn any of us a DIME if we're not writing interesting articles or reading each others' work.